​One time when we were making pierogi, my mother was telling me about the time a German guard at the ammunitions factory hit her on the left side of her head with the butt of a rifle so hard that she was knocked to the ground. For the life of her she didn't know what precipitated the assault. Maybe she hadn't been working fast enough, maybe this, maybe that. Who knew? The guard didn't have to answer for his actions and she was, after all these years, still puzzling it out, still looking for answers that were essentially, unanswerable. I wondered what it was that helped her survive those horrible war years in Nazi Germany. She didn't always answer my questions but I asked her anyway. She thought about it for a while. "I always told myself that everything would be alright," she said, " that I would manage, that my situation would change, that it would get better. I had to think that way and tell myself that. Any other thought was to fall into a pit that you couldn't get yourself out of, to start courting dangerous thoughts of suicide. I saw that, too," she said, but wouldn't elaborate when I pressed her for more information, just a final "always tell yourself that things will work out." I've thought a lot about what she said to me that day, how important it is to self talk, to convince yourself in spite of evidence to the contrary that everything would come out all right. I've never had to deal with war or starvation or brutality at the hands of others but I thought a lot about what she said to me that day after I took on the task of trying to write the very book she inspired, Wearing the Letter P: Polish Women as Forced Laborers in Nazi Germany 1939-1945. The more I read and translated, the deeper I researched and read, the more overwhelmed I became about what I had set out to do. It just seemed impossible to pull all the various threads together to make whole cloth, to get the facts straight, to write a unified story that made sense. There were times when I felt my efforts were futile, my goal -impossible. Years went by. And then I remembered another thing she used to do. Before starting a task, even something as simple as beginning a batch of pierogi, she would make the sign of the cross on herself out loud: In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen. And then say "W Imie Boże." In God's name. She was asking for success in what she was doing, asking God's help. Following her lead, the first words on any translation, on any page of writing, I began with the words "W imie Boże." It wasn't just my thoughts about my mother that kept me working on the project. As I read about other Polish women as forced laborers and what they did to manage their intolerable situations, I took on their examples. They couldn't control their situation, only their response to it. Like the women had done so many years ago, carrying photos of their loved ones to sustain them as they left Poland for Nazi Germany, I surrounded my desk with photos of my family - the concrete evidence of my mother's self talk, realized. There were other photos: my aunt in Auschwitz, my mother before deportation to Germany, and oddly enough, a photo of American pioneer women, living on the dusty prairie in sod huts with dirt floors and where running water meant a nearby stream. They were reminders. That, I said to myself whenever I looked at the photos, that is hardship. Keep working. Keep writing. Everything will turn out alright.

The DP's in the neighborhood call the radiator factory where my father works the "czerwona" (red) for the rust color of the buildings and the fine coppery dust particles that float unrestrained throughout its cavernous interior. When the men gather round the table drinking whiskey and beers, they affectionately refer to her womanly qualities. "After a week off I start to miss her," they complain, or "She can kill you if you're not careful." All conversation centers around the shop, the union, grievances and seniority. They talk about her night and day and go to her even when sick and hung over. Some, like my Tata, can't even stay away from her while on paid vacation.

I wake early sometimes and listen to the normal, reassuring sounds of my father going off to work. Mama moves around the kitchen, stoking up the Kalamazoo, heating thick vegetable soup and slicing bread and sausage for his lunch pail while Tata has his smoke and warms his heavy boots. They say little to each other. They sit together in silence at the oilcloth covered kitchen table, teaspoons tinkling against their morning coffees. Both are lost in their own morning reveries.

I lie in bed and picture my Tata in the layers of beige-turned brown thermal underwear and his murky black work clothes which have been mended and re-mended. I contrast this tattered image of him with the younger man I've seen in the photo's that are kept in the Schrafft's Luxuro chocolate box. Sporting baggy pants and suit jacket, he smiles into a camera while casually strolling down a French street, an arm around the petite, dark haired woman that is my mother. Another snapshot reveals him astride a motorcycle in high black leather boots, goggles resting on his forehead, obviously cursing the machine.

As he walks through snowdrifts without benefit of morning light, a respectable person on his way to a respectable job, he doesn't resemble the man who sold his wedding ring on the black market for a pound of butter. As he spades the garden in a baseball cap, he doesn't resemble the man who defied German gendarmes by making moonshine out of apple mash. When he looks at the beets in the garden is he reminded how, wrapping two in a cloth, he threw them over the barbed wire fence in Germany to feed his wife and child?

I wonder what he thinks about, my Tata, as he lifts and carries, lifts and carries hundred pound weights of iron against his wiry hundred twenty pound frame? I wonder whether he hears the noise of the factory or feels the fine steel chips settling quietly, irrevocably on his lungs? Does he give himself up to the very real moment or does he retreat to thoughts of himself as a young man in Poland atop a horse drawn wagon decorated with white carnations and colorful ribbons as the best man in his friend's wedding? Is it iron he feels in his hands or is it the harness that he flicks over the backs of a pair of horses? In place of smoke and dust does he smell pine and resin while roaming an autumn forest in Poland looking for mushrooms? Does doubling over in front of his grinding machine remind him of days gone by when a man bowed waist deep to a woman and kissed her hand? Does he long for the feel and smell of newly tilled earth beneath his feet, the sight of ripening fields of wheat instead of concrete and I-beams? Or is the reality the preferred because in some strange magical combination, steel and sweat makes bread to eat. The scorching heat, salt from his pores, dust as fine as flour and muscle fibers continually expanding and contracting blend together to make costly loaves of Polish American bread.

When it comes time for Tata to come home from the woman who teaches him how to make bread, mama sends me down the block to meet him saying that he's tired and needs someone to help him carry his lunch pail home. I run down the street, crossing railroad tracks and passing men on their way to second shift, keeping my eye on that distant point where he always first appears. And we meet at the corner, my hand reaching out to grab the lunch pail.

"Zoska," he'll always say, "you'll get your hands dirty."

It's a small game we play together. I know he's saved me a piece of chocolate as a reward for coming to meet him. I laugh and, tired as he is, he'll smile too, the corners of his eyes creasing up with dirt. And after holding the lunch pail behind his back to tease me, he relents and hands it to me. I take his hand then, not caring about the dirt at all, and we walk home together, hand in hand, the lunch pail swinging.

I wrote this many years ago but I stlll think of and cherish how hard my Tata worked to give us a decent life in America. January 10th marks his birthday.

The winters in Western New York have always been fierce. I can remember snow drifts up to our waist on the way to elementary school. I can't say that my mother sent us to school with a potato in our pocket to keep us warm but she did send us to school bundled up from head to toe. In those days it meant zip-up rubber boots, better known as galoshes; knee-high socks or pants under the required dress or skirt that was the dress code back then; heavy wool coats and a warm hats for all of us or in my case, a wool scarf tied tightly under my chin, Polish style. She was fanatic about keeping our heads and ears warm. There was no arguing with her about this, something she adhered to until the end of her life. She even gave her advise freely to strangers like the time we were coming out of Kresge's one windy, summer day. Just outside the door she spots a young mom with a baby in a stroller THAT DIDN'T HAVE A HAT ON! On seeing this my mother walks up to the young mom and in her broken English tells her nicely that the baby should have a hat on to protect its head and eyes and ears. I was so embarrassed that she was promoting her agenda on other people's babies but she remained unmoved by my agitation. "She's very young, " she calmly says to me, "maybe she doesn't have a mom to tell her these things."

Rain or snow we wore galoshes over our shoes. Feet were not to get wet or cold. Nobody walked barefoot or just in socks in the house during winter, including my father. She darned any holes in our socks, everybody got slippers for Christmas and they were to be worn at all times in the house. Nothing could shake her conviction that the body needs to be kept warm from head to toe, both outside and inside: a hot breakfast; hot buttered toast; hot milk was better than cold milk and even hot, very weak coffee, laced with plenty of milk and sugar was part our fare before we went off to school.

We did as she demanded (and I'm not using the word loosely here) because there were penalties if we got sick. Hard to say which of her homemade remedies was the worst but the collective memory of all of us kids was that they were, without a doubt, bad. First there was the cod liver oil, something she learned in the Displaced Person (DP) camps after the war. When the war ended, Polish men, women and children were suffering from malnutrition and tuberculosis. Besides food and penicillin, children received doses of cod-liver oil, rich in fat soluble Vitamins A and D to promote proper bone growth and development as well as healthy eyes. She gave it to us as a preventative, just in case. It came as a liquid in a glass bottle and it stunk. On cod liver oil day we had to line up at the kitchen sink and using what I always felt to be an oversized spoon, one that she kept only for cod liver oil dispensing, we got regular doses of it throughout the winter. Immediately after we swallowed our dose, we each received a small piece of bread with a little bit of salt sprinkled on top. Don't ask me. I don't have an answer as to why, but after that cod liver oil, it was something to look forward to.

Then there was the onion syrup remedy for coughs and colds - universally acknowledged to be avoided at all cost. Raw onions were chopped fine, placed in a jar, mashed and ponded to release the juice and a generous amount of sugar was added. It was pretty vile but take it we did. My mother was not the type to care whether we wanted something or not. But if I'm looking for any lasting trauma from the experience, it has to be that I don't care for raw onions to this day.

The hot beer remedy was for the flu that went around every winter. In a saucepan she heated half a bottle of beer. She beat the yolk of an egg with a couple of teaspoons of sugar until smooth and then whisked it into the beer until it kind of foamed up. All nice and hot she brought it to your bed where you were lying under the pierzyna (staying, of course, warm) and made to drink every drop. Not as dreadful as the others, mind you, but hot cocoa would have been better. She fluffed up the pierzyna to better amass it over you and commanded "Stay under there until you've sweated." And sweat we did. You really do learn how our feathered friends stay warm in winter once you've slept under goose down. When we woke up from our alcohol-induced, goose feather-sweating sleep, we felt better.

One of the biggest moments in my life was being able to sign for my very own library card. When I'm not reading, researching and writing I'm riding my bike, sewing or gardening. I love flea markets, folk art, and traveling to Poland.